legal history — Bunk History

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Black and white people sitting at a lunch counter.

When Rights Went Right

Is the American conception of constitutional rights too absolute?

by David Cole via New York Review of Books on March 31, 2022

Michikinikwa ("Little Turtle") statue by Douglas Hyde.

Native Prohibition in the Federal Courts

Over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Congress enacted several laws restricting the sale of alcohol to Native Americans.

by Winston Bowman via Federal Judicial Center on March 1, 2022

Picture of the U.S. Supreme Court

Reading the 14th Amendment

A review of three books about Abraham Lincoln, the 14th Amendment, and Reconstruction.

by Earl M. Maltz via National Review on February 3, 2022

Drawing of a spiral bound notebook with pen markings.

Fighting Racial Bias With an Unlikely Weapon: Footnotes

A collaborative project by legal scholars sets out to make visible the vast array of legal precedents based on cases involving enslaved people.

by Justin Wm. Moyer via Washington Post Magazine on January 14, 2022

White police officers arresting Black children, 1963

Rescuing MLK and His Children's Crusade

A new book traces the tactics of groundbreaking lawyer Constance Baker Motley amid pivotal protests in Birmingham.

by Tomiko Brown-Nagin via Harvard Gazette on January 13, 2022

A bus, and a Black man at the bus stop standing under a sign for a "Colored Waiting Room."

Homer Plessy Was Never a Criminal. Now His Record Reflects That.

In rejecting Plessy’s argument that the Jim Crow law implied Black people were inferior, the Supreme Court upheld the notion of “separate but equal.”

by Keisha N. Blain via MSNBC on January 5, 2022

Watercolor painting of enslaved people walking barefoot on a forced march, with white men on horseback at the front and back of the line.

Reparative Semantics: On Slavery and the Language of History

Scholarly accounts of slavery have been changing, but these correctives sometimes say more about historians than the historical subjects they're writing about.

by Nicholas T. Rinehart via Commonplace on January 4, 2022

Brett Kavanaugh

What Justice Kavanaugh Gets Wrong About Abortion and Neutrality

Calls for the court to remain neutral have long been tools for denying Americans rights.

by David Cohen, Maya Manian via Made By History on December 13, 2021

Protesters in front of the Supreme Court, one with a "Keep Abortion Legal" sign and the other dressed in a Handmaid's Tale costume.

The Unknown Supreme Court Clerk Who Single-Handedly Created the Roe v. Wade Viability Standard

All roads lead to Larry Hammond, Justice Lewis Powell’s law clerk at the time.

by James D. Robenalt via Retropolis on November 29, 2021

Kyle Rittenhouse

Kyle Rittenhouse Is an American

Our country's legal history renders the teen's case familiar if not inevitable.

by Patrick Blanchfield via Gawker on November 16, 2021

A mural depicting the portrait of Ahmaud Arbery, on the side of a building.

Trial of Arbery's Killers Hinges on Law that Originated in Slavery

Georgia enacted the Citizen's Arrest Law in an attempt to maintain control of enslaved people.

by Alan J. Singer via HNN on November 7, 2021

The United States Supreme Court building.

‘Originalism’ Only Gives the Conservative Justices One Option On a Key Gun Case

Regulations limiting armed travel in public, particularly in populous areas, stretch back over seven centuries.

by Saul Cornell via Made By History on November 3, 2021

Texas Governor Greg Abbott signs state legislation on voting rights.

The Strange Career of Voting Rights in Texas

Republicans in Texas, and indeed around the country, remain hell-bent on going back to the future.

by Derek C. Catsam via The Activist History Review on October 20, 2021

Portrait of Steve Bannon with a serious expression

Executive Privilege Was Out of Control Even Before Steve Bannon Claimed It

A short history of a made-up constitutional doctrine that gives presidents too much power.

by Timothy Noah via The New Republic on October 18, 2021

The National Archive rotunda, Washington, D.C.

Why Americans Worship the Constitution

The veneration of the Constitution is directly connected to America’s emergence as global hegemon.

by Aziz Rana via Public Seminar on October 11, 2021

A woman on her knees wearing a cowboy hat with an anti-vaccination protest as the background

The Baffling Legal Standard Fueling Religious Objections to Vaccine Mandates

As anti-vax plaintiffs seek faith-based exemptions, the judicial system will renew its struggle to determine what beliefs are truly “sincerely held.”

by Charles McCrary via The New Republic on September 27, 2021

The illustration “Vaccinating the Poor,” by Solomon Eytinge Jr

The Surprisingly Strong Supreme Court Precedent Supporting Vaccine Mandates

In 1905, the high court made a fateful ruling with eerie parallels to today: One person’s liberty can’t trump everyone else’s.

by Joel Lau, Peter S. Canellos via Politico Magazine on September 8, 2021

The First Hague Conference in 1899: A meeting in the Orange Hall of Huis ten Bosch palace – collections of the Imperial War Museums.

Oh, the Humanity

Yale's John Fabian Witt pens a review of Samuel Moyn's new book, Humane.

by John Fabian Witt via Just Security on September 8, 2021

Picture of a computer.

The Internet Is Rotting

Too much has been lost already. The glue that holds humanity’s knowledge together is coming undone.

by Jonathan Zittrain via The Atlantic on June 30, 2021

Artistic photo of John Marshall

America’s ‘Great Chief Justice’ Was an Unrepentant Slaveholder

John Marshall not only owned people; he owned many of them, and aggressively bought them when he could.

by Paul Finkelman via The Atlantic on June 15, 2021

Bus station with 'colored waiting room' sign.

Plessy v. Ferguson at 125

One hundred and twenty five years after the Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, there are still lessons to be gleaned from the case.

by Rachel Reed via Harvard Law Bulletin on May 19, 2021

Black students from West Charlotte High School leave the school bus

How White Americans’ Refusal to Accept Busing Has Kept Schools Segregated

The Supreme Court has refused to force White Americans to confront history.

by Matthew D. Lassiter via Made By History on April 20, 2021

Making the Supreme Court Safe for Democracy

Beyond packing schemes, we need to diminish the high court’s power.

by Samuel Moyn, Ryan D. Doerfler via The New Republic on October 13, 2020

Photograph of people lining up to hear arguments in Brown v. Board of Education.

The Case for Ending the Supreme Court as We Know It

The Supreme Court, the federal branch with the least public accountability, has historically sided with tradition over more expansive human rights visions.

by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor via The New Yorker on September 25, 2020

The Great Liberal Reckoning Has Begun

The death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg concludes an era of faith in courts as partners in the fight for progress and equality.

by Alan Z. Rozenshtein via The Atlantic on September 22, 2020

“The Unrestricted Dumping-Ground” by Louis Dalrymple, published in Judge, Vol. 44-45 (1903).

A History of Ideological Exclusion and Deportation in the United States

On the passage and enforcement of laws to exclude or deport immigrants for their beliefs, and the people who challenged those laws.

by Julia Rose Kraut via Law & History Review on August 31, 2020

Racism on the Road

In 1963, after Sam Cooke was turned away from a hotel in Shreveport, Louisiana, because he was black, he wrote “A Change Is Gonna Come.” He was right.

by Sarah A. Seo via New York Review of Books on July 23, 2020

How to Make a Deadly Pandemic in Indian Country

From the 1918 Spanish flu to Covid-19, broken treaties have been the foundation of health crises among Native people.

by Nick Martin via The New Republic on July 22, 2020

Holes punched in the Constitution.

There’s No Historical Justification for One of the Most Dangerous Ideas in American Law

The Founders didn’t believe that broad delegations of legislative power violated the Constitution, but conservative originalists keep insisting otherwise.

by Julian Davis Mortenson, Nicholas Bagley via The Atlantic on May 26, 2020

The Long, Winding, and Painful Story of Asylum

An ancient concept, asylum has become just another political tool in the hands of our government.

by John B. Washington via The Nation on April 20, 2020

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